From Chaos to Order: Articulating the Urban Policies for Cities of Hardship

Abstract

This chapter uses the term urban chaos as an alternative to words such as anarchy, randomness, and disorder. It expresses the visual and behavioral failure that describes a property that was not taken into consideration when dealing with the theme of hardship cities. The terms livability and quality of life focus on measuring functional, social, economic, and political indicators, ignoring visual and behavioral indicators as not essential for creating cities of hardship. This work presents two concepts, chaos city (CC) and order city (OC) based on the reviews of livability, quality of life, and the writings of Christopher Alexander, to demonstrate the lack of standards of livability to the visual and behavioral indicators. The addition of these indicators helps to classify cities of hardship from the perspective of the relationship between chaos and order and tries to provide guidelines and proposed action plan related to urban policies (UP) that enable the transformation of CC to OC.